JustMigrate : To Help You Migrate From Posterous to Tumblr

Posterous recently announced its shutting down. And  a whole lot of folks who had switched to the very popular blogging platform suddenly need to move to a new service yet again.

This is a Tumblr only problem. I personally backed up the Posterous blogs and imported them into WordPress in a few easy steps outlined here.

- Request a backup in Posterous Spaces
- Wait for the completion of the above (you get an email)
- Save the zip file
- Unzip it
- After having created a WordPress account, on the dashboard, go to Tools->Import and use the wordpress_export_1.xml file from the unzipped directory to start the import.
- Wait

But, on Tumblr, no such luck. You just cannot do an import from other services. (Read Quote of Sachin Agarwal’s answer to How can I import an existing blog into Tumblr? on Quora)

JustMigrate is a service created for solving exactly this!

So I did a quick test for one of my blogs.

Its easy enough to get started with. You enter your existing posterous blog, enter the email id that you setup your Tumblr account with, and go!

I had started the migration for 100 posts a few hours ago. But as you can see above, there’s a queue and I’m still waiting! I had moved from Posterous to WordPress earlier – free, easy and WordPress did send a done mail much quicker.

To be fair, this is small team and a quick hack, not a “startup” yet (the team itself is working on http://3crumbs.com/). It was created as a reaction to a specific, but high visibility pain point, and many do start that way. This might be the start of a longer journey of blogging tools, especially cross platform ones, but for now, its very useful hack if they can figure out the scale to make the most of this short term opportunity.

Related posts:

1. Tumblr attracts wrath from Senior Bachchan : An oppportunity for WordPress?
2. Importing post permalinks from new Blogger to WordPress: step by step guide
3. DailyDose: Posterous To Shut Down On April 30 & Google to Open Own Stores

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Pune gets its online grocery store, RationHut

Grocery and personal care seem to be a hot category on the web for entrepreneurs. In the past three months, NextBigWhat has seen spate in launch of city specific online grocery stores. 

After PuneExpress, Pune has got its another online grocery store rationhut. Launched by Ashish C and Shruti S, rationhut offers more than 4000 products across categories such as grocery, home care, personal care, amongst several others.

Currently, the startup claims delivers orders across all parts of Pune and Pimpri-Chinchwad limits with no delivery charges for orders exceeding Rs.499. Like other startups in the space, RationHut offers delivery in two time slots – morning and evening.

To facilitate delivery on time, rationhut has one distribution center and three store points covering the entire city. “We have 8 runners and 3 vans that move from the Distribution Centers to the store points and 6 two wheelers that take care of the micro deliveries,” said Ashish, co-founder, rationhut.

Unlike most of other startups in grocery etailing space, rationhut is a pure play online play as it doesn’t enable consumers to order through phone or call centers. So far, the venture is being bootstrapped by founders, and not looking to raise fund.

At present, Grocery and personal care contribute around 55% of rationhut’s sale. As far as traction is concerned, rationhut delivers around 20 orders a day with average order
size Rs 950. “Our traffic sees a growth of approximately 34% monthly with returning visitors contributing 9% share,” added Ashish.

The Pune based startup offers Cash on Delivery (COD) along with debit and credit card as payment options. It also allows consumers to pay via swiping credit and debit cards at their doorstep.

Apart from grocery and personal care, rationhut intends to launch vegetables and ice-cream as separate categories in coming months. “We plan to expand across all laterals, and aim to be the largest online hypermarket for Pune,” said Ashish.

rationhut also eyes to expand into cities like Hyderabad and Mumbai. “Our immediate focus is on having a mobile application for rationhut and enhancing the website usability and experience in order to minimize the time required to shop online by almost 60%”, concluded Ashish.

If you are from Pune, do give RationHut a spin and share your experience.

Recommended Read : Online Grocery Stores: A change for the better for the traditional retailers?

Related posts:

1. Shop for grocery online in Pune with Punexpress
2. MomGrocery launches online grocery store in Hyderabad
3. Now shop for Grocery & FMCG on the go in Bangalore, Zopnow launches Android app

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MyCLOUD is a new generation Chinese learning tool for students

Learning Chinese gets easier with MyCLOUD, and four more Singapore primary schools will be using the platform by 2014.

Learning Chinese has always been a problem for some children and to address this issue, MyCLOUD is launched as an interactive platform that supports new generation teaching methods and bringing the learning of Chinese beyond classroom walls. The Chinese name for MyCLOUD (语飞行云) reflects the key elements of the project which includes the language, accessibility through the mobile technology (“moving”), and cloud computing.

Recently, Microsoft Singapore, Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), Nan Chiau Primary School (NCPS) and the National Institute of Education (NIE) have collaborated under the umbrella of Microsoft Centre for Education Research and Application (CERA) to come up with the MyCLOUD mobile learning tool for Chinese, which will be brought to four more primary schools by 2014.

This unique mobile teaching and learning tool includes features such as personalized e-dictionary, text to speech reading, which reads out words to show how the characters should be pronounced, and photo vocabulary, in which students can take images outside of class and construct sentences that best caption the picture. MyCLOUD also integrates social networking functions in order to maximise students’ engagement and discussion with teacher and classmates in Chinese.

Prolonged usage of Chinese in real life enhances students’ Chinese proficiency. With this in mind, MyCLOUD is currently incorporated into the curriculum of its Primary Three and Primary Four pilot classes and starting this year all Primary Three students in the school will access MyCLOUD on tablets during Chinese lessons and at home. Singapore Hokkien Huay Kuan strongly supports NCPS and has even begun sharing the experience of MyCLOUD with four other primary schools: Tao Nan Primary School, Ai Tong Primary School, Kong Hwa Primary School and Chongfu Primary School.

According to principal of Nan Chiau Primary School, they observed that their students have now started learning Chinese language in a different way. They are more self-directed in learning and are showing positive response for the new teaching method.

MyCLOUD was incubated at the Microsoft CERA and an enhanced version of the platform, MyCLOUD 2, is currently under development at Microsoft CERA and will offer new features that will make the Chinese learning journey even more fun and compelling for students. The MyCLOUD initiative is part of the Microsoft’s global Partners in Learning programme. In Singapore, Microsoft has been heavily involved in the government’s efforts to integrate technology into education, so as to expand the power of teaching and learning, including the BackPackLive! initiative, a collaboration with the Ministry of Education (MOE), the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA).

Image Credit: Brand Crowd

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Why 100 Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs are Sailing Around Asia Right Now

Somewhere out in the South China Sea right now, there’s a boat-load of entrepreneurs, business people, non-profit folks, and general movers and shakers from Silicon Valley who are heading toward Singapore. They’ll be making their way through Myanmar, India, South Africa, and all the way over to Morocco and Spain before they finally finish in Barcelona.

The mission behind the ‘Unreasonable At Sea’ project is to “put all our portfolio companies on one ship, align them with some of the world’s greatest mentors, and set sail more than 25,000 nautical miles while visiting 13 countries over the course of 100 days.”

This concept of being unreasonable, according Daniel Epstein, the sailing founder of Unreasonable at Sea, is derived from a famous quote from George Bernard Shaw who said that “all progress depends on the unreasonable man” because he “persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.” Thus, the ship carries entrepreneurs who are eager to make their dent in the universe. Most of the companies have a humanitarian mission that is focused on changing the world for the better.

Just yesterday, Unreasonable At Sea had its first event in Ho Chi Minh city. With nearly 100 people in attendance including An Le, the country’s consulate general to the United States, the event’s workshop was led by Tom Chi, one of the Unreasonable At Sea mentors. Citing lessons he personally learned from prototyping the Google Glass and gestural interfaces, Tom advocated prototyping many solutions rather than focusing too heavily on a problem.

In addition to the workshop, the audience got to hear pitches from a handful of startups, including:

• Guru-G from India: an educational startup focused on training teachers on an online platform
• Solar Ear: is developing a solar charger for hearing aids.
• Aquaphytex: an agricultural startup aiming to clean water using plants.
• Protei from Europe: a startup that builds shape-shifting wind-powered open-source sailing drones that clean lakes.
• Evo Tech from the US: a medical startup that builds cheaper, easier-to-use endoscopy machines for hospitals.
• Prakti from Vietnam, Cambodia, US: a startup focused on making energy-efficient and waste-effective stoves.

The event, although smaller than expected because of the Lunar New Year last week, was a healthy networking opportunity for the Vietnamese people in attendance who wanted to learn about the design thinking behind a Silicon Valley startup. So check out their map as they may be coming to a city near you. By the way, their next stop is Singapore.

Here’s a quick video about the project:

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Google could pay Apple US$1B in 2014 to remain the default iOS search engine

Leading search engine Google will reportedly pay $1 billion in 2014 to remain as the default search engine on iOS.

According to a recent report by Morgan Stanley, Mountain-View based search giant Google could pay a large sum of money — costing around $1 billion in 2014 — to remain as default search engine on iOS. Comparatively, Google paid only $82 million in 2009 and this price hike is due to per-device deals growing each year as mentioned by analyst Scott Devitt.

Morgan Stanley’s report entitled The Next Google Is Google shows that the total traffic acquisition cost is fairly proportional to the number of iOS unit sales. With the increase of traffic acquisition cost rate going up from $3.2 per unit last year to a probable $3.3 per unit this year and $3.5 per unit next year, this statistic will likely be viable, especially if iOS sales will maintain its growth in the years to come. Because of this, the analysts estimated that Apple would be raking in about US$ 1 billion from Google by 2014 for the privilege of keeping Google.com as the default search engine on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad ahead of rivals Bing and Yahoo.

Apple has made efforts to remove all traces of Google from its iOS cash cow, which included dropping Google Maps in a controversial move. However, it seems that Google is still willing to pay a premium to have a presence on Apple’s mobile platform. Stiff competition is expected asMicrosoft has also been trying very hard to push Bing as the default search engine. Bill Gates has even been reported to comment that “Seriously Bing is the better product at this point. Try the challenge. I am biased but the work to make Bing better has been amazing.” Bing is currently the default provider on Nokia and BlackBerry devices.

The other big recipient of cash under the Traffic Acquisition Costs heading is the Mozilla Foundation, which will be getting $400 million this year to keep Google as the default search engine on the Firefox browser. Opera is also another longstanding partner.

It seems like Apple is having it easy, as Google is providing an easy way for the company to rake in significant amount of revenue each year. Nonetheless, the smartphone market is evolving rapidly and it is only a matter of time before the Apple-Google deal peaks as Samsung is now the dominant smartphone manufacturer in terms of volume.

Source: TechCrunch

Image Credit : Modmyi

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HealthValley.Asia is an online platform offering Asia-centric healthcare content

Healthcare meets technology as HealthValley.Asia will showcase some of the most note-worthy healthcare news and commentaries from top-level thought leaders in the industry, as well as features on startups and cutting-edge services.

Offering Asia-centric healthcare technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) news and analysis, HealthValley.Asia was launched today by BH Media, a health-focused interactive TV and online company,.

A subsidiary of Singapore headquartered Borderless Healthcare Group, BH Media announced that HealthValley.Asia offers in depth discussion and exploration of cutting-edge services like mobile health applications, health-cloud services, mobile medical concierges, super health portals and digital home health, as well as feature note-worthy healthcare startups, health-related mobile apps and products.

“HealthValley.Asia is Asia’s premier online content hub that features the latest news and trends in the healthcare TMT space. Featuring commentary from respected and renowned thought leaders in the fields of healthcare and technology, HealthValley.Asia will be the online home of healthcare TMT in Asia and, soon, the rest of the world,” said Dr. Wei Siang Yu, medical doctor turned entrepreneur and founder of Borderless Healthcare Group.

Made up of appointed council members in some 20 countries during the launch of HealthValley.Asia, the online platform also aims to be the virtual hub for the HealthValley Global Chapter Network. Currently, there are a total of 25 contributors on the website.

Given the ability to join in as honorary council members of their respective countries’ chapter, these invited members will also see their profiles being featured on the official website. Tasks include assisting HealthValley.Asia with the facilitation of global healthcare TMT business matching, inbound trade missions, conferences, and exhibitions including the organizing of the annual Borderless Healthcare Forum in their own countries.

Dr Wei added, “We are seeing a lot of innovation in healthcare in Asia and our goal is to highlight and facilitate these innovations which leverage technology, telecommunication and media.”

Image Credit: HealthValley.Asia

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Krittit is a review portal explicitly built for mobile users

Krittit is a ratings service that allows you to quickly review products and lifestyle experiences, and see what people buy, use and recommend.

While the idea is nothing new, cofounder Jeremy positioned the app as a review portal explicitly built for mobile users. The app allows you to sort reviews according to four fields: Taste, Touch, See, and Hear. Basically, Taste covers restaurant reviews, very much like HungryGoWhere. Experiences such as Singapore Zoo and the Marine Life Park fall under Touch, and See and Hear includes movie and music reviews.

We spoke to Jeremy to find out more about the new review app:

How did the idea come about?

We had been considering different mobile apps to develop, but were yet to identify something that we felt made a clear difference to what was already available on the market. One evening when traveling on the MRT we were watching people using their mobile devices. What stood out was how people were quickly jumping between different news sources or games to gather information and be entertained. From this it became clear we wanted to provide people with a easy to use application that users could jump in and out of as needed and would form a meaningful part of their day. It then struck us that there are no clear review portal leaders  for a range of products and services.

We did some research and concluded that while traditional review portals offered a lot of information, there were three clear limitations. Firstly, reviews tended to be text intensive and in some instances users were utilizing the platform to conduct a “gripe session” rather than spread effective feedback. Secondly, the subjective nature of reviews meant that the tastes of the person reading the comments were not necessarily aligned with that of the person who made the review, therefore making it difficult for people to place a value on the opinion they were reading. And thirdly, the review portals were predominantly designed for use on web rather than mobile and were therefore not benefiting from the different use procedures of a mobile versus a traditional web user.

What pain points are you solving that existing platforms are not addressing?

From the information gathered and noted above, there are four main pain points we seek to address with the creation of Krittit:

1. Provide a review portal explicitly built for mobile users.
2. Provide a single point of reference for users to gather review data while ensuring the information is clearly and logically compartmentalized – hence the introduction of the senses: taste, touch, see and hear.
3. Provide an intuitive user platform that allows users to post quick yet meaningful reviews for a range of products and services.
4. Allow users to filter reviews not only by category but also by friends and the general population. This way, if required, users are able to easily source reviews on areas of interest solely from people they know and trust.

What is your strategy to acquire users and have them contribute content to your platform?

As seeking the opinions of people a user trusts is a key factor in ensuring the success of Krittit, we are initially launching the app solely in Singapore. This is due to the following reasons:

1. Singapore has a high penetration rate of mobile devices
2. Comparatively speaking, residents of Singapore have a high amount of disposable income. This is complimented by a strong desire and ability to socialize and share in each other’s occasions.

These influences, coupled with social factors such as a love of food, shopping etc, help make Singapore an attractive market to launch the app and gather initial feedback.

With the above in mind we will be relying on social media to help drive user growth. We shall also be running competitions and seeking partnerships with local and international companies who will benefit from having users provide concise, meaningful reviews of their products and services knowing that these reviews are being explicitly shared with friends. We feel this “friend effect” will provide a strong marketing potential for vendors as friends are the clearest “key influences” in having people try, or stay away from, a product or service.

Once we have a good gauge of the use cases in this market we will be looking to make the app available to other areas in the region as well as expanding into North America and other markets.

Author’s thoughts

While the idea of the app is noble, at the end of the day, the utility of an app lies in whether I can find what I need. When trying out the app, Krittit seems to be focusing on too many verticals, thereby diluting the focus of each verticals. Unlike food review and discovery platforms such as Burpple or HungryGoWhere which has thousands of reviews, Krittit seemed to be lacking on user generated reviews, something the team will definitely have to work on.

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99Designs Holds Fun Contest to Come Up with PS4 Logo

Sony’s Playstation 4 is going to be unveiled this Wednesday. To make things a bit more fun, Australia-based design marketplace 99designs is holding a contest for its users to come up with a logo for the Playstation 4. Of course, it’s Sony’s job to create the logo, but 99designs felt that gaming-obsessed designers might like to have a crack at it anyway.

The submission deadline is tomorrow and now there are nearly 2,000 entries for the contest so far. While waiting for the unveiling, you can check the fan-made logos here.

Sony (NYSE:SNE) is not involved in the contest in any way.

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SingTel, StarHub’s decision to develop own Whatsapp makes absolutely no sense

Singapore’s top two mobile operators SingTel and StarHub have made known today that they are taking the fight to WhatsApp, which has become the dominant messaging service in many parts of the world. Faced with declining revenues from SMS, both telcos are developing their own chat apps that they hope to launch within the next few months.

While the Today article is vague about SingTel’s plans, it reports that StarHub will be working with Vodafone to create an ‘interoperable’ service that includes instant messaging, video calls, and file sharing.

But here’s the problem: what StarHub has described sounds exactly like WhatsApp.

Sure, it would have been feasible to develop a WhatsApp killer one or two years ago, but the fact is that market conditions have shifted dramatically in one important way: They’re no longer battling against just Whatsapp or Vibe, but also Kakaotalk, Wechat, Line, and many others.

These competitors aren’t minnows. KakaoTalk has 95 percent market share in Korea and almost 30 million daily active users, Line is dominant in Japan, and WeChat is favored in China. While Southeast Asia remains an open field, it’s getting increasingly muddled as Kakao and WeChat are already deploying their troops here. There’ also the small matter of Facebook Messenger, which recently introduced free voice calls to its users.

Furthermore, assuming that both SingTel and StarHub have not started on app development (and it will take months to deploy one), both telcos may find themselves falling further behind in the sweepstakes for the untapped markets.

So, it’s a battle against time for traction, and given the nature of chat apps and how network effects come into play, first movers would have a distinct advantage.

What this means is that it’s foolhardy for StarHub and SingTel to build an app from scratch. With too many competing products already out there, finding traction would be immensely difficult. And given that their motivation to build a chat app is to stem the revenue decline coming from lesser SMS usage, it is more logical to acquire a mature, profitable chat app that is already occupying a niche in Asia.

Acquisitions not only cuts deployment time dramatically, it gifts these telcos instant market share in the mobile messaging space. They would also acquire expertise that they would need to integrate their own digital content ventures like mioTV and StarHub TV with the apps.

There is no shortage of candidates out there. SingTel has a quarterly net profit of around USD 759M, giving it the wherewithal to be ambitious and go for the biggest fishes in the pond.

Kakao, with a valuation of about USD 454M, is just slightly more expensive than Amobee, an advertising platform that SingTel acquired for USD 321M.  Kakao is profitable, with a large chunk of revenue coming from its Game platform and virtual emoticon stores. There’s also, Viber, which at 140 million users (the author doesn’t say what kind of users), is well within SingTel’s reach.

It is anybody’s guess whether these telcos have made a serious play for these popular apps. Ruminating about an acquisition is easy, but negotiations can fall through should either party disagree with the terms. Nonetheless, given the large number of apps with millions of users out there, it shouldn’t be difficult to acquire at least a mid-tier company.

So, if SingTel or StarHub wants to build their own chat app, they’ll have offer something that’s truly different rather than adding to the noise by offering more of the same. One way to do it would be to create an API that links all the disparate apps together, resolving the fragmentation issue that is plaguing the market.

But given their track records at in-house app development, which have been underwhelming, I’ll be surprised if they manage to pull it off.

No doubt, both telcos should be lauded for trying to adapt to the shifting winds. But instead of steering the Titanic, they should be acquiring speedboats that have been running circles around the mobile operators.

SK Telecom, Korea’s largest telco, learnt this the hard way when it got blindsided by Kakao. Faced with the threat of becoming irrelevant, it acquired a mobile chat app and leveraged on the startup’s expertise to create a product with promising traction. It too is competing for market share in Southeast Asia.

It’s time SingTel and StarHub get a grip on reality before its too late.

 Gwendolyn Regina T and Isaac Timothy T contributed to this report.

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Kaifu Lee: I’ve Been Banned From Weibo for 3 Days

Entrepreneur and former Google country manager for China, Kaifu Lee, is often outspoken on his Chinese social media presences – and not just about technology issues. Now Lee says that he has been banned from two such services, Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, for a period of three days. Lee has 30.4 million followers on Sina Weibo alone.

It’s not clear what caused Kaifu Lee’s ban from two totally separate social sites, but it’s obvious that this was mandated by authorities. Being unable to post to either of the Twitter-esque Weibo services, Lee took to actual Twitter to say, in Chinese, “I’ve been blocked from Sina and Tencent Weibo for three days; come take a look.”

我在新浪腾讯都被禁言三天，大家可以来这里找我。

— Kai-Fu Lee (@kaifulee) 2013年2月17日

This isn’t Lee’s first brush with censorious authorities due to his Weibo missives. Just last month, Lee hinted cryptically – a necessary safeguard on the Chinese web – that he had been questioned by police over his support for one outspoken Chinese newspaper in a heated battle over what tiny remnants of editorial freedom of speech remain in the country.

Even more recently, Lee was vocal in his objection to the temporary web blocking of Github, the social programming site used by many Chinese developers.

If you’re wondering how authorities can order such bans be put in place, then the answer is they just can. Last year we chronicled 10 of the most extraordinary cases of Weibo censorship – and there’ll surely be enough cases for a similar list at the end of this year.

Lee should be back on both Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo by the 20th.

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Amikom Game Dev Passes 1 Million Downloads And Looks to Inspire More Game Developers in Yogyakarta

Back in September, we talked about a game developer community at STMIK Amikom Yogyakarta University called Amikom Game Dev (AGD). Last week, AGD founder Agoes Tri Hariyanto has celebrated its first anniversary last week as well as formed a game company called Cupcorn Games to facilitate the AGD members’ need for a serious and professional outlet. AGD is definitely one of the biggest game developer communities in the city, and together with the newly formed startup, they aim to build more Indonesian-themed games all the while help spurring the game industry in Yogyakarta.

Since its inception in October, Cupcorn Games has developed two games: Labirin Hantu (meaning “Ghost Labyrinth”) and Animariot Indonesia. Staying true to its vision, both games have Indonesian characteristics, such as the ghost pocong in Labirin Hantu.

Interestingly, Cupcorn doesn’t just develop cyber games. At the moment the startup is also developing a ghost-themed physical board game with local ghosts like leyak and tuyul. They hope to launch a few more games by March.

AGD will continue to exist as a place to inspire and grow local game developers. Its two flagship games, Panjat Pinang and Ular Tangga have seen more than one million downloads so far. With such a feat coming from a one-year-old gaming community, Agoes’ believes that Jogja-based game developers have the same potential and business capabilities as those from Jakarta and Bandung.

Both AGD and Cupcorn also held a four-day event called Jogja Game Fest last week to celebrate AGD’s first anniversary. Not only was the team able to showcase various game developers from the city, but they also cooperated with some secondary high schools to develop an extracurricular class for game development.

It’s great to see how well AGD has developed in the past year, but also how the team has become an inspiration for other aspiring game developers in the city.

We wish AGD a belated happy birthday, with all the best wishes in the coming years!

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